BU dining hall survey offers $1,000 reward

The Your Voice Counts program has come to dining facilities on campus to tell students that their voice does, in fact, count.

The national program allows campus dining customers to visit a website and complete a survey to provide instant feedback about their dining experience said Jessica Gallippo, marketing manager for Baylor Dining Services.

Participants in the survey are entered to win $1,000. The daily winner is chosen from among 10 universities participating in the program. Everyone who completes the survey is entered into the contest.

Aramark, the food service provider, runs the Your Voice Counts program, but another company, Empathica, oversees the data collection and gives it to Baylor Dining Services. Gallippo said the chance to win the daily prize helps motivate students to participate in the program.

“The daily prize winner is a nice little bonus incentive, but I don’t think that it completely, you know, makes the student want to participate,” she said.

Flushing, N.Y., freshman Brauna Marks said the chance to win the daily prize was one of the reasons she participated in the survey, but the opportunity to share her opinion was the main reason she completed the survey, she said.

Students can take part in the program and provide their feedback by clicking the Your Voice Counts icon on Baylor’s campus dining homepage, http://dining.baylor.edu/en-US/CSSW/Baylor/.

“It’s a means to leverage technology better to get feedback to us,” said Brett Perlowski, director of dining services. Baylor Dining Services has set a goal for the number of responses they receive.

The hope is to get 10 completed surveys per location per month, he said. Gallippo said dining services is meeting that goal at most of its locations.

“Our smaller locations, like we have Season’s Sushi as a location, they don’t quite hit 10, but if we get a few for Season’s that’s definitely positive in my book,” Gallippo said. “For the larger locations, like the student union building, the BSB, we’re hitting that 10 mark.”

Since the program began in November, around 300 responses have already been submitted, she said. “I think it’s just awareness, getting the information out to the students, letting them know that they can use this at any time,” she said.

The student responses are instant, but the major changes, as a result of both the Your Voice Counts program and the semiannual survey, occur once a year, Perlowski said.

“We design a program each fall to reflect doing things better and then make minor tweaks of sorts between the fall and the spring,” he said. Baylor Dining Services may be tweaking its semiannual dining survey.

“Those aren’t completely going away, but we are looking into doing them once a year in the fall,” she said.

The semiannual survey gives the dining department more detailed information but may become less crucial as the Your Voice Counts program provides instant evaluation, she said. Baylor Dining Services is providing some opinions of its own.

Because Baylor is one of 10 pilot sites for the program, dining services reports the data collected to Aramark and gives incites into how the program is working, Gallippo said.

“The program will continue to grow,” she said, as more schools implement the program on their campuses. The plan is to continue the program on Baylor’s campus indefinitely, she said.